For your too-thin-wall problem, just to make sure I understand is it this area here that is too thin? :





For putting in a fillet there, it seems to work ok for me but note that this length here is only 0.007 units:




So only a quite small fillet will fit in there, here's an example filleting both longer edges using a radius of 0.003 :



Is that going to be enough to solve it though or do you really need something like moving this entire face inwards a ways:



If so then by what distance? The length on the bottom part here is only about 0.045 long:



so there isn't a whole lot of space to move back by but maybe some?

- Michael

And for the "move face" part, that was accidentally a diagonal line I measured by, there's more like 0.025 straight distance available there.

- Michael

That's the right face. I tried the fillet and got it to work (didn't think to try one so small (feature request: find largest possible fillet)), but Shapeways is still rejecting those edges. They require .028" minimum wall thickness, but it's hard to translate a corner into a wall thickness. I'm happy to push the face back .025" (based on their render that looks like it may be enough), or as far as it needs to go.

Hi Involute, so I pushed it back this far (as seen from the Top view), so that it wouldn't leave any really tiny piece sticking out. That's a distance of about 0.0219 units:



3DM file is attached. The process of pushing it back doesn't take long but there are a few tricks to do it quickly - I first drew in a line in the top view for the new end position. Then I selected the top face and 3 side wall faces and use boolean difference to cut them. You can do a boolean with face sub-objects selected and that causes the boolean to only cut those selected faces ignoring all others. That cut the object up as needed and left some excess faces to be deleted. Then to cut the new vertical wall I had to extract out the large grounding face below it and do an "untrim" on it (select all of its edges by selecting 1 and doing Ctrl+A for select all then using delete), then I trimmed the new vertical wall with that, joined the vertical wall to the others, and then retrimmed the ground against all naked edges then rejoined, repeat that for each side. Let me know if you want more details on this.

The new face is 0.0278 units wide, hopefully it's enough since it is a corner type area and expands from there, not exactly a wall thickness.

- Michael

Thanks for doing all this, Michael; I know you're busy and I really appreciate it. Hopefully I'll become self-sufficient soon. ;-) I uploaded your model to Shapeways and it passes now. In the meantime, I'd like to learn how to do this myself, but I only got as far as, "repeat that for each side." Not sure how to do that. I'm still left with the triangular hole in the ground surface.

Hi Involute, you're welcome and I'm glad it passes now!

Later tonight I'll send some more details on how to fill the triangular area, but real quick for now the key thing is that it is done using an "untrim" followed by an Edit > Trim. There is some info on untrim here: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=444.4 and also in the object repair tutorial here: http://www.moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=446.17

You have to use Edit > Separate on the "ground" face first to break it off into an individual surface, after that you can do the untrim by selecting all of its edges (quick way to select all edges of a surface is to select one edge to start with and then use Ctrl+A for "Select All") and hitting Delete. That will remove the trim boundaries and recover the full original "underlying surface" of the face which is a big sphere. Then it has to be retrimmed.

Also one other quick note for now - it looks like you put in a line here to make the new vertical plane:


That won't be quite right because the "ground" face is curved, so instead you want that new vertical plane to initially stick downwards a ways so it pushes through the ground then use Edit > Trim on it using the ground as the cutting object. Once you have trimmed that vertical plane with the ground you'll then have all the edges to retrim the ground sphere, there are 19 edges that the sphere needs to be trimmed against but they are all naked edges so in the Edit > Trim command you can use the "Select naked edges" shortcut key to select all the needed ones rather than going around and selecting them with individual clicks. Once the "ground" sphere is retrimmed you then use Edit > Join to glue it back in place.

I can give you some images later tonight to explain it better.

- Michael

Thanks for the additional details, Michael. I was able to follow your instructions, push the faces back, and get a solid acceptable to Shapeways.

Sounds good Involute! Please let me know if you would like any more details on any of those steps.

- Michael

Impressive how you figured out the problem and gave a very detailed instruction! I wouldn't have been able to sort that out